Who invented the computer? Like many important technological developments, the invention of the computer cannot rightly be attributed to a single person. It is clear, however, that World War II was crucial to the emergence of the electronic digital computer. The first general-purpose electronic computer was the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, the ENIAC, sponsored by the U.S. Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and developed at the the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. The leaders of the project were physicist John W. Mauchly and a young electrical engineer, John Presper Eckert. In this interview, done in 1988 by David Allison and Peter Vogt for the Smithsonian Institution, Eckert described how the war provided "the opportunity"and the money to solve "engineering problems, scientific problems in general"that interested them.

Religion figured prominently in the 1928 presidential election when Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic governor of New York, became the first Catholic to run as the candidate of a major political party. Smith, who ran against the Republican Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, tried to downplay the subject of his religion. In this article from Atlantic Monthly of April 1927, lawyer Charles Marshall argued that loyalty to the Catholic Church conflicted with loyalty to the United States. Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick had solicited the Marshall letter, although he was himself a Smith supporter. He thought that the religious debate was inevitable, and he tried to place it on an intellectual plane. Although the article revealed anti-Catholic biases, Marshall's views were less strident than those of many contemporaries.

In 1892 the possibility of a Labor-Populist alliance circulated. Populist orators like Mary Lease sought to build ties between the Farmer's Alliance and the labor movement by mobilizing farmers to send wheat and corn to striking workers at Carnegie's Homestead steel mill outside Pittsburgh. Despite the support for such an alliance among many in the labor movement, American Federation of Labor leader Samuel Gompers opposed such political action. Gompers insured that the A.F.L maintained, in his words, "a masterly inactivity" on political involvements. In this appeal to Kansas farmers, published as a letter to the editor in the Topeka Advocate, Lease attacked the "misrepresentations" of those who claimed that farmers did not understand and sympathize with workers.

At the turn of the 20th century, unprecedented levels of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe to the United States aroused public support for restrictive immigration laws. After World War I, which temporarily slowed immigration levels, anti-immigration sentiment rose again. Congress passed the Quota Act of 1921, limiting entrants from each nation to 3 percent of that nationality's presence in the U.S. population as recorded by the 1910 census. As a result, immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe dropped to less than one-quarter of pre-World War I levels. Even more restrictive was the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act) that shaped American immigration policy until the 1960s. During congressional debate over the 1924 Act, Senator Ellison DuRant Smith of South Carolina drew on the racist theories of Madison Grant to argue that immigration restriction was the only way to preserve existing American resources. Although blatant racists like Smith were in the minority in the Senate, almost all senators supported restriction, and the Johnson-Reed bill passed with only six dissenting votes.

In 1892 the possibility of a Labor-Populist alliance circulated. Populist orators like Mary Lease sought to build ties between the Farmer's Alliance and the labor movement by mobilizing farmers to send wheat and corn to striking workers at Carnegie's Homestead mill. Top labor leaders like Samuel Gompers did not respond to Lease's and other Populist leaders' overtures. Gompers's opposition to labor support for Populism was part of his broader reluctance to entangle the labor movement in any political alliance or in political action at all. Despite Gompers's opposition, the 1892 AFL convention did endorse the Populist calls for initiative, referendum, and government ownership of the telephone and telegraph system as well as a campaign to increase trade unions' political activities. In 1896 there was renewed pressure for the AFL to endorse the combined Democratic-Populist ticket headed by William Jennings Bryan. Gompers sought to meet that pressure with this circular to "affiliated unions," which argued against allying with the Populist Party.

In 1920, after more than seventy years of struggle, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted women the right to vote. While nineteenth-century suffrage campaigns gained partial voting rights for women in twenty states, beginning in 1910 the push for suffrage took on a new urgency under the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the more radical National Woman's Party (NWP). Their campaigns reached wide audiences, in part because suffragists had learned to spread their messages through imaginative use of various media. Supporters held old-fashioned pageants and street parades as well as statewide tours, thanks to the relatively new technology of automobiles. "Der Sufferegetsky," a Yiddish suffrage song, illustrates yet another medium used in the campaign for women's enfranchisement. In the lyrics, a female suffragist imagined the days when women would be treated like people and men would do the cooking. Her male interlocutor glumly predicted that emancipated women would mistreat men. [English translation follows Yiddish.]

Between 1916 and 1921 a half million African Americans left the South and journeyed to cities in the North and West in what was then the largest internal movement of a people in such a concentrated period of time in the history of the nation. Migrants' letters to northern newspapers were among the best and most voluminous sources for understanding the migration process and interpreting the migrants' motivations for leaving. Seven letters to the Chicago Defender -- a black newspaper published in Chicago that strongly urged southern blacks to migrate North--attest to migrants' strong desire to "better their condition," often risking their lives and possessions to make the trip north.

These six family budgets collected by the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1884 show the range of family incomes and spending patterns within the working class. Although skill level was probably the most important determinant of wages, relatively few male breadwinners were able to earn a "family wage"--enough to support their wives and children decently. Most families pooled their members' wages in what historians call the "family economy." The wages of children and teenagers often meant the difference between a modicum of comfort and mere survival, and women who were not working for wages sometimes brought in money by operating home-based businesses such as washing clothes or keeping boarders. Women also contributed to the family's economic survival by managing the household budget, sharing resources with other female householders, and scavenging for discarded food, clothes, and fuel. Unlike current times, prices were not constantly rising in the late-19th century, and the period's declining prices (particularly food prices) allowed a modest, gradual improvement in working-class living standards.

The twenty-three slaves advertised on this poster belonged to a Kentucky planter, John Carter, who decided to "liquidate his assets" before moving to the free state of Indiana. With the westward extension of slavery, planters in older states such as Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina found they could make up for declining profits by selling slaves to newer areas of cultivation, such as Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The internal slave trade destroyed families and brought misery to both individuals and the larger communities in which they lived. Between a fifth and a third of all slave marriages were broken through sale or forced migration, and the expansion of slavery meant that relatives forced to relocate were more likely to end up hundreds of miles away from their families.

Even before the 1890s depression struck with devastating force in 1893, large numbers of jobless men and women competed in tight labor markets and faced homelessness. One of the best first-hand descriptions of "what it is to look for work and fail to find it" comes from political economist Walter Wycoff's two-volume study of The Workers: An Experiment in Reality, first published in 1899. Wycoff had abandoned his studies at Princeton to seek a more concrete appreciation of social problems. His record of his two years spent as a common laborer became an early classic of sociological writing.

In the 1920s, advertisements sought to create consumer demand by manufacturing new wants. Some advertisements associated products with a desirable lifestyle, while others, like this 1928 cigarette advertisement, made use of celebrity endorsements. Here, aviator Amelia Earhart, the first woman to successfully fly solo across the Atlantic, testifies to the pacifying virtues of Lucky Strikes. Although advertisers suggested that everybody needed the latest of everything, most families set their own priorities and purchased the things they wanted most.

While the numbers of free blacks remained small in the South through the mid-nineteenth century, their presence aroused great anxiety among whites. Legislatures passed laws limiting African-American political and social rights. Non-slaveholding whites often viewed free black labor as competition, especially in urban areas where tensions between the two groups sometimes ran high. In 1838, J. J. Flournoy, a white Georgian artisan, wrote this letter to the Athens Southern Banner complaining about the competition posed by black workers. While he noted in passing that the white majority of the poor should band together to elect representatives to ensure laws that would privilege white labor over black, he more forcefully appealed to a common "whiteness" among contractors and carpenters, proprietors and workers.

Lion Gardener, author of this 1660 narrative, was an English military engineer who came to Connecticut in 1635 to oversee the construction of the fort and town of Saybrook. Thus he was present for the Pequot War of 1637, in which Connecticut settlers massacred the Pequot Indians. Gardener, who had advised against engaging with the Pequots, left Connecticut in 1639 and settled in Long Island. There he lived on Gardener's Island, which he bought from Wyandanch, the sachem (chief) of the Montaukett tribe, with whom he had friendly relations. In the early 1840s, Miantonomi, the sachem of the Narragansetts, a rival of the Montauketts, came to Long Island to create an alliance with the Montauketts and other local tribes against the English. Gardener and Wyandanch succeeded in contacting the leaders of nearby Connecticut for help, the plan was stopped, and Miantomi was captured and executed the following year.

In November 1917 the second phase of the Russian revolution unfolded, as communists led by V. I. Lenin took power. Although deeply disturbing to President Woodrow Wilson and other western leaders, the Bolsheviks promised a far-reaching social transformation that appealed to downtrodden peoples around the world. This cartoon was one of a series by Alfred Freuh in the radical weekly Good Morning that celebrated the Bolshevik Revolution's impact on Russia's aristocracy: Count Parasitsky will not occupy his palatial residence in the mountains this summer

The struggle for woman suffrage lasted almost a century. The 1848 Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, initiated public discussion of votes for women, and serious campaigning began with the founding in 1869 of two original (and competing) suffrage organizations--the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. The two groups joined forces in 1890 to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). NAWSA campaigned diligently for the vote in a variety of ways but did not achieve success until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. Elizabeth Cady Stanton served for twenty years as the president of the National Woman Suffrage Association and as the first president of NAWSA. In 1892, she resigned at age 77. Her resignation speech, "The Solitude of Self," eloquently articulated the arguments for the equality of women that she had spent her adult life promoting.

Father Charles Coughlin occupied both a strange and a familiar place in American politics in the 1930s. Politically radical, a passionate democrat, he nevertheless was a bigot who freely vented angry, irrational charges and assertions. A Catholic priest, he broadcast weekly radio sermons that by 1930 drew as many as forty-five million listeners. Strongly egalitarian, deeply suspicious of elites, a champion of what he saw as the ordinary person's rights, Coughlin frequently and vigorously attacked capitalism, communism, socialism, and dictatorship By the mid-1930s, his talks took on a nasty edge as he combined harsh attacks on Roosevelt as the tool of international Jewish bankers with praise for the fascist leaders Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler. The "Radio Priest's" relentless anti-elitism pushed Roosevelt to sharpen his own critiques of elites, and in that sense Coughlin had a powerful impact on American politics beyond his immediate radio audience. This 1937 sermon, "Twenty Years Ago," reflected much of what made Coughlin popular.

The Truman Administration's Cold War policy of containment advocated confronting the Soviet Union, in the words of diplomat George F. Kennan, "with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world." In 1952, during the Korean War stalemate, John Foster Dulles authored the Republican Party platform's foreign policy plank condemning containment. Dulles instead supported the "liberation" of countries within the communist sphere using any means "short of war." When Republican nominee General Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency and Dulles became his secretary of state, however, containment remained the official U.S. policy. In 1954, as France was losing its battle to regain control of its prewar colony of Indochina--a war funded substantially with U.S. dollars--Congressional leaders refused to support an Eisenhower-Dulles resolution to intervene militarily. In the following opinion piece published just after the French defeat, correspondent Edgar Ansel Mowrer, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for reporting on the rise of Hitler, offered a critique of containment and an analysis of U.S. options for fighting the Cold War. A great admirer of Dulles, Mowrer believed hopes for peaceful coexistence to be "the opium of the West."

Television had become the nation's largest medium for advertising by the mid-1950s, when the Revlon cosmetics corporation agreed to sponsor The $64,000 Question, the first prime-time network quiz show to offer contestants fabulous sums of money. As Revlon's average net profit rose in the next four years from $1.2 million to $11 million, a plethora of quiz shows tried to replicate its success. At the height of their popularity, in 1958, 24 network quiz shows--relatively easy and inexpensive to produce--filled the prime-time schedule. Many took pains in their presentation to convey an aura of authenticity--contestants chosen from ordinary walks of life pondered fact-based questions inside sound-proof isolation booths that insured they received no outside assistance. To guarantee against tampering prior to airtime, bank executives and armed guards made on-air deliveries of sealed questions and answers said to be verified by authorities from respected encyclopedias or university professors. When the public learned in 1959 that a substantial number of shows had been rigged, a great many were offended; however, one survey showed that quite a few viewers didn't care. Following the revelations, prime-time quiz shows went off the air, replaced in large part by series telefilms, many of which were Westerns. The industry successfully fended off calls for regulation, and by blaming sponsors and contracted producers, networks minimized damage and increased their control over programming decisions. In the following testimony to a Congressional subcommittee, contestant Herbert Stempel described the process through which every detail of the seemingly spontaneous battle of wits was, in fact, scripted, rehearsed, and acted for dramatic effect.

On February 15, 1898, an explosion ripped through the American battleship Maine, anchored in Havana Harbor, sinking the ship and killing 260 sailors. Americans responded with outrage, assuming that Spain, which controlled Cuba as a colony, had sunk the ship. A great deal of the American public's outrage was generated by media coverage--newspapers and the emerging film industry--of the incident. The Biograph Company renamed its film The Battleships "Iowa" and "Massachusetts" the Battleships "Maine" and "Iowa," and immediately released it to theaters. It played to cheering audiences. Newspapers, like those published by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, were even more influential in stirring American public opinion into a frenzy over the sinking of the Maine. In contrast to more sensational accounts of the Maine explosion, the staid New York Times cautiously reported on February 17, 1898, that there "was no evidence to prove or disprove treachery" as a factor in the sinking of the battleship.

Beginning in the late 1870s, white southern landowners, entrepreneurs, and newspaper editors heralded a vision of a "New South" with a modern, industrial economic system. The defeat of the Confederacy, the abolition of racial slavery, and the demise of the plantation economy provided the South with opportunities to build factories and turn its raw materials into finished products: cotton into cloth, tobacco into cigarettes, coal and iron ore into steel. But mill workers, small farmers, and agricultural tenants and sharecroppers in the "New South" suffered decades of long hours, low pay, unsafe working conditions, and deplorable living situations. These anonymous comments made by cotton mill hands and farmers in 1887 and 1889 to agents of the North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics challenged the arguments of the "New South" boosters and illustrated the grim price workers paid for the region's embrace of the much-touted new industrial order.